Marketing has a distinct role to play, alongside the product team, to create a better post purchase customer experience to increase the LTV of your customers.

Speaker 1:

0:00

Make the logo bigger, moves at the speed of content these days. If you're publishing your, your invisible, welcome to make the logo bigger, understanding the language that your audience leverages to search for things on Google is not exactly how you talk about your product or service, and so that research component is fundamentally critical.:

Speaker 2:

0:18

The podcast that takes you behind the scenes of a marketing agency:

Speaker 1:

0:21

when you're talking or thinking about merging, everybody needs to go back to the basics for a little bit and just get back to the core little individual aspects of marketing and do some of the simple things better.:

Speaker 2:

0:33

Two guys that get paid to do this stuff on a daily basis,:

Speaker 1:

0:36

be what you expect people to expect you to be. Have a lot of expectations, right? So if you just focus on you know why you're doing what you're doing and tell that story. People are going to pick up on that passion. Here's your host, Bill Rice. Oh, we don't. We don't need that because we get referrals, right? But at the very core of that, that referral was generated by some form of marketing and Mike Carroll. Understanding the language that your audience leverages to search for things on Google is not exactly how you talk about your product or service, and so that research component is fundamentally critical:

Speaker 2:

1:07

and now the obligatory legal disclosure, blow rice is the founder and CEO of Kalydeco, a marketing and design agency. Mike Carroll is the head of growth at nutshell, a crm software provider. All opinions expressed by bill are definitely the opinions of Quantico. All opinions expressed by Mike or his own opinions expressed by guests of this podcast could be right or wrong. Who knows? This podcast is for informational purposes and has a reasonable probability of making your marketing better. And now this week's episode.:

Speaker 3:

1:38

All right, we're on episode 12 of make the logo bigger and today we're going to talk about breaking up our customer Ltb and I've got mike here with me. How you doing Mike? Hey Bill. I'm doing pretty good. How are you buddy? Very good, very good. Hey, so today we're going to actually lead a bit a bit with a migraine:

Speaker 4:

1:55

topic here and so he's going to kind of guide us through this, but what we're talking about is, um, you know, marketing has it's kind of specific role. I'm alongside a product team, um, and it was kind of really understanding that that customer experience, um, and potentially the cycle of the customer will go through. You can really start to increase or create campaigns and experiences that will really increase the lifetime value of your customer. And uh, before we kinda jump into all that though, as you guys know from our last podcast, we lost a key employee and that was, that was Mike and so mike has gone on to different stuff and so I want to take just a little bit of a time here at the beginning to, to talk about that transition and let Mike of talk about what he's doing now. But I think this is actually going to add a lot of flavor and texture and depth to the podcast. So. So Mike, why don't you tell our audience what you're doing now. You're outside the agency doing something kind of radically different. Yeah. For me it's um, it's an interesting experience. I'm the head of growth at a nutshells,:

Speaker 5:

3:00

a crm company in Ann Arbor for those knots on everyone probably is, but it shouldn't be super familiar with crm is customer relationship management software. Um, our major competitors are, you know, your insightly's of the world, your salesforce as your pipe drives, all that kind of stuff. Um, I'll have plenty of time to like pitch the software later. Um, but as head of growth, I'm responsible for all marketing and sales activity for the most part I would say pre a customer purchase. We have a customer experience slash success team that handles support. I'm not sure it's kind of different in that way by the way. We actually offer, you know, 100 percent free always on live person customer support. Um, nobody really does that for the reason for that is it's really difficult to scale at which we're obviously running into a but uh, but at the same time.:

Speaker 5:

3:51

So anyway, so I'm responsible for, yeah, for, for running the marketing and sales department. Um, you know, I've got about a team of six, technically seven here I guess, and now actually I have another agency that I have to manage of course, um, as much as I wanted to, you know, to hire a Colorado, you when you come into a new organization, their legacy things that you have to deal with. Um, and so now I've got this kind of like really fresh when I say fresh, not fresh, isn't like nobody's ever had this experience before but fresh for me because I just started, um, you know, experience of understanding what it's like to be outside the agency relationship and managing one from the other side of the table. And of course I have all my sort of like institutional knowledge from, from working with UPR and Kalydeco.:

Speaker 5:

4:31

Um, and it's going to become really interesting. I think our next podcast, we're going to talk about that collaboration a little more now that I've got some, some other side of the table insight a as we say, but, but basically when I came into nutshell, which is what I want to talk about today. Um, you know, I was looking at different ways, so nutshells growing pretty steadily every, every year at about, you know, 20 percent of course, my mandate here is to grow things around 30, 35 percent, which seems like not that big of an increase, but of course it's, it's a pretty significant jump and I've been sort of exploring different ways in different levers that we can pull and sort of where we get the biggest bang for our buck from a growth perspective. Um, and one of the most obvious ways to do that of course is to like expand the lifetime value of your actual customers.:

Speaker 5:

5:16

Once someone's already paying you, it's much easier. And this was true on the agency side by the way. So I think this is kind of a more universal discussion about whether you're a sas company, whether you're an agency, whether you sell t shirts, doesn't really matter. Once somebody has spent money with your company, they are far more likely to spend more. I'm so figuring out how to do that is probably the best way to not expand overall growth, but to expand revenue growth in the, in the near term. So I thought it would be a great topic for us discussing it.:

Speaker 4:

5:46

Yeah, totally. And then we were kind of, we focused on the same things. Um, obviously the, the services that we provide, usually a client comes in for one particular set of services and then obviously we have the capacity and capability. I'm usually beyond that and oftentimes in our particular case, uh, the more of those services that we can provide and tightly integrated, the better performance they get out of the overall engagement. So, uh, so we're just the similarly focused. Even as we did this transition, my first focus was really to kind of hunker down and dig into each client and making sure that we were kind of providing the best level that we could with them. And of course that enhances our, our lifetime value and allows us again to integrate those other things. But yeah, holds, holds true. I think so often people are all always trying to fill the funnel, which is obviously important, but at the same time when you're doing that, if you're distracted, sometimes you actually neglect, um, the clients that are, that are already in the stable and are looking for solutions. Um, and if you take your eye off that ball, they'll go look for solutions other places. So you really gotTa Kinda pay attention to the things that they're trying to do. Um, you know, while you're potentially doing something different. Um, so yeah, this applies across the board for sure.:

Speaker 5:

7:06

I think that's a really good point too, by the way. It's like there's a sort of, I don't want to call it a grand assumption, but when you're on the marketing side of things in particular, which is what we're here to talk about, um, you know, product people are, you know, obviously whether it's product people like your account managers and an agency or product people like the people developing a product and a SAS company or even product development, some sort of retail scenario, you know, are largely responsible for for quote unquote, you know, the post sale customer experience and as marketing people we are hyper focused like you just said, bar on like filling that funnel, you know, and all of our efforts are going to how to expand the funnel, how to get more leads, how to do all that kind of stuff. And, and we just forget that like we've already done the hard work of acquiring all these customers.:

Speaker 5:

7:52

Let's expand that value. So if nothing else, you're getting a better return on your marketing investment. I mean, that's, I think a lot of times people forget about that, which is like if you're having to report out to a client or report out to your boss or whatever else, what you're spending on ad words, you know, the, the lifetime value of your customers, what's going to bring down your acquisition costs or increase your Roi if you really think about it. So, um, that's what I think is like the, that's where my mind came to when I started thinking about, you know, what I was going to first do here at nutshell, and it's actually not necessarily focusing on lifetime value. We're going to focus on the bottom of the funnel here, which can be a different discussion for a different time. But that being said, like on day one when I came in here, we recently went through a, we have a bunch of users on what we call national classic nutshell.:

Speaker 5:

8:40

Classic is a, it's just as powerful as quote unquote know. Now, always on nutshell with our oldest customers are most valued customers at technically not most value. That's a bad way to put that, but like, are, are more, I guess the customers that trust us the most. They've been with us since the beginning. Um, and we had to increase the price so we can continue to support their, their instance of nutshell, which is nutshell classic. Um, but when I first came in, one of the things that I asked, I was like, well, we're going gonna ask them to upgrade to pro because now when you sign up for a nutshell, it's nutshell starter, nutshell pro. And we also have pro plus, which is a different thing and you know, we're, we're, we're asking them to upgrade to pro, but we weren't really running like a, like an upgrade to pro campaign.:

Speaker 5:

9:18

Um, and so that was the first thing I did when I got here as well during this whole process. Let's run an upgrade to pro dedicated campaign. The classic users, we identified the things they were doing inside of their classic account, um, and that would lend itself better to some pro features. We targeted them, segmented them accordingly, um, and it was reasonably successful. And so it just kind of put me down that path. It was like, you know what, this needs to be something that you're paying attention all the time. Almost waited 50 slash 50 with like, Hey, I'm filling the funnel full of new leads and then the other half of your time is kind of dedicated to creating a really dynamite experience for your existing customers.:

Speaker 4:

9:53

Those particular cases, I mean obviously there's a reason that you guys progress to another level. It probably enduring some pain points that a,:

Speaker 5:

10:02

that:

Speaker 4:

10:02

they're not even aware that you guys have already solved. Potentially. That could be a horrible experience. They start to solve that pain somewhere else. I mean that's again, you can't. I think sometimes when we have a customer or we're afraid to kind of engage them and find out, um, sort of where they're at and you just kind of hope that they'll continue to love you. And I think that that campaign more than anything probably gives you an opportunity to have a conversation with them to see, okay, you know, what, we think this is probably challenging for you. This is why we made this, this particular iteration of the software:

Speaker 5:

10:34

better, um, and then have a deeper conversation about whether or not that it gets them there. Right. So totally. And there's always this apprehension. I, you know, I feel like, just like you said, which makes sense, which is like don't upset the apple cart with current customers, don't what they do, what they've asked you to do, don't try to expand. But you know, Vr, when you and I are working together at Kalydeco, I mean we figured out very quickly and very early on that like our easiest way to expand, for example, when we built out the new video capabilities wasn't to go out and find a new video clients was to alert all of our existing clients. So we had this new capability and that's what sustained that quote unquote department, you know, for its lifetime. It's not a thing necessarily still have that capability inside of Kalydeco obviously, but it's not one of our focuses are we wanna your focuses anymore. That's going to be hard. By the way. I'm going to our in your. I'm going to screw up all the time.:

Speaker 4:

11:31

Well, I think one of the things that is kind of like a sideline, but I was just thinking it was sort of talking here. The other thing that I think is always discounted and, and um, you know, experiences a little bit because we've onboarded some, some new clients recently and we're going after some, some other new ones, but the kind of the other reasons to focus there and I think haven't been in your guys' business years ago in the crm space. I think kind of the same thing applies for what you guys are doing. Um, whenever you're trying to bring a new client on board, it is actually a real drain on resources and focus when you're trying to pull those people in because you're, you're doing a lot of stuff for free. You're reaching out, you probably over the client and our business. You're trying to kind of figure each other out.:

Speaker 4:

12:17

Um, and that can be frustrating for both your internal employees and even for the new client. And so you're trying to kind of create that relationship. And then I would suspect, and this is what we ran into on the software side of things and the software side of things, those new incoming customers can be particularly distraction because one, you're trying to board them, the salespeople were putting a lot of pressure on, you know, getting them in the door because that means something to them, obviously compensation and those sorts of things. But all these new clients usually arrive with like a laundry list of things that they would love for your software to do and can be hugely. Like I'm annoying as the salesperson is trying to convince them, no, we've got everything you need to do and not trying to promise anything. And, you know, at the same time, you know, because these new clients or have some remarkable vision of how crm should work and stuff like that. So I think a lot of times these new clients, um, and even for us, you know, they want you to do something differently or they want you to conform to their process. So they want you to have just three or four more, you know, very specific, probably not useful features. And those kinds of things, so, so even getting new clients can, can really be a suck on the organization as well.:

Speaker 5:

13:34

Totally true. And you know, when we considered what I haven't ran the numbers and I was looking at like, you know, the Mrr monthly recurring revenue increases opportunities which we like, oh, okay, if we, if we bored, you know, x percentage of new customers versus, you know, per month based on our current lead, you know, lead flow or whatever else versus if we were to upgrade x amount of these customers are particular cohort, let's say their customers with three to five seats or something like that. It doesn't even the math is crazy, uh, on, on the other side, on increasing the lifetime value of our actual customers. Whether that's having them upgrade to a different plan or having them extend their lifetime value. You know, it's a, it's a huge thing. So I think the other thing on the, like when you're looking at LTV is if you don't pay attention to like the overall lifetime value of your clients, no matter what, no matter what kind of business you're in, then you're going to end up becoming like ultra addicted to paid acquisition, which is really a negative thing, right?:

Speaker 5:

14:34

Which I'm kind of more finding out vr than like I did when I was, you know, we're running pe programs for people at Kalydeco because I was so focused on, you know, like basically lead acquisition is paid. Acquisition is not a one to one like scenarios. So like you would when you first started out, if, let's say you're spending $10,000 a month on ad words like Oh okay I spent $10,000 and I got let's say just for easy math, say 100 leads out of that, great. If I spend 20,000 I'll get 200. It actually doesn't work like that because like the marketplace you're playing and by the way is obviously going to become more competitive. The cost per acquisition is going to go up. And you know, so on and so forth and so it's Kinda like the thing that eats itself. So it's the only way to really, you know, to kind of keep a hedge on that is like to keep the customers you did acquire for longer than more money.:

Speaker 4:

15:26

Something that degrades over time too. I mean we've had this with clients too. They're like, oh, you set up ad words like it should be fine with just what do we need you guys for? But it's, it's amazing to watch, and this has happened over the years, it's gotten even worse is, is literally you leave your ad words account alone for like a week and you'll watch the competitive nature of the marketplace just chew up a waste your money. And it's just, it's really dynamic in there. It's kind of amazing. You'll have, you know, a kickass ad texts, you know, campaign ad group or whatever, that's just really doing it. And then all of a sudden you'll wake up, you know, three or four days later. And it's like getting pelted, right? Or just wasting a lot of money and not getting conversions anymore. And they haven't changed anything but the, but that's to your point, that's the marketplace is changing very quickly. So there's so many tools like people know what you're doing, um, and that kind of stuff. So that, that's kind of changed a lot of kind of how this plays. But so, so we've talked about obviously I think most people get it or at least we feel like we've, we've done our best pitch. Why you need to hear this. Um, what's, um, what's kind of the, how of it?:

Speaker 5:

16:39

Yes. I mean, I think that depends on obviously what you're selling. Um, for us at nutshell it is. I think there's a couple of things that we are going to start doing a slightly better job. One is like not explaining how people use the product itself, like the functionality, but doing a better job of being a thought leader in this space because obviously we're talking to all salespeople all the time. Whether they're sales managers are just regular sales reps or bdrs or whatever on how to extract value out of the tool. How to leverage the tool to increase their efficiency, to increase their return on investment, to increase their sales, all that kind of stuff. Because the tool itself doesn't actually, you know, do that necessarily. There's no, by the way, I'll shock the world here for all the sales and marketing people listening, which I'm sure you all know, but there's not a single crm that you can use.:

Speaker 5:

17:34

It's going to actually increase your sales. Is that how that works? Uh, so, um, and I might even get some, some blow back internally, I'd saying something like that, but like the only thing that increases sales or you, however, it's our responsibility as sales and software thought leaders and also marketing thought leaders to explain to people how to extract that value, how to leverage the tool in any number of ways to teach them new ways to use the tool. Um, one of the things I think I'm excited about is actually we use nutshell ourselves obviously, so to expose to people how we use it. Um, and it might be more sophisticated than they're used to or or whatever else. But I think that's one of the things, so ongoing education, um, is a great way to increase lifetime value and to, and to keep your customers engaged over time.:

Speaker 5:

18:19

Um, you know, with, with whatever it is you're selling, even if you're selling tee shirts, right? Like, um, I'm thinking of like, let's take, for example, the company like tipsy elves, tipsy elves came onto the scene and they were just selling, what do you call it, those stupid Christmas sweaters, right? Like that was all they were selling and it, it went through the roof man, that they sell a crap ton of those Christmas sweater, ugly sweaters, right? So, but then they offered, they've got tee shirts and like all sorts of other stuff. And so I actually had to find that out the hard way by like cruising around the Internet when I bought my first ugly Christmas sweater. Like they should be putting people on a newsletter that keeps them entertained, you know, for them it's more an entertainment factor, right? It's all jokes and memes and gifs and whatever.:

Speaker 5:

19:04

But so that at some point they can alert me to the fact that like, oh, by the way we sell this other t shirt, which anecdotally happens to be one of my favorite tee shirts, which leprechauns are magical, is my favorite tee shirt and say, um, so that's one example of that. Uh, so it doesn't matter what business you're in, it just took the opportunity to engage your current customers usually via email, um, is what you gotta do it in such a way that they actually either a look forward to the next email or, or more to the point like don't unsubscribe. Right? That's the.:

Speaker 4:

19:33

Yeah. And I think a north side of the business, you know, agency wise, you bring up a really important point about educating them, uh, in the space and how they leverage the tool and everything. I mean, I think we kind of have a similar scenario where we want to lead with thought leadership. We want to educate them on sort of the right way to do things because they're the ones that, one, we have the highest lifetime value on and we delivered the best experience and outcomes are those that truly appreciate us as the experts that we are, those clients that, and I know this when you were here, this is probably one of your top frustrating points to, is when somebody turns this into a just to creative services department where they just say, hey, you know, deliver me three display ads, um, and I want them to look like this and I want them to say this.:

Speaker 4:

20:26

Well that's, you might as well just get a freelancer, right? To do whatever you're saying because longterm one, you're not leveraging kind of all the experience we're deriving from our client base and from our, you know, over 15 years worth of experience in doing this. Um, you know, but at the same time you're gonna you know, you're going to get frustrated because you're gonna be spending all this time like figuring out the, the creative aspect of it or figuring out the campaign or figuring out the new thing that's happening out in the marketing marketplace that's, that's been effective engaging customers. So, so it's really a. So we're spending and continue to, and even things like this when this podcast is to really spend more time, uh, getting our clients to think about a sort of what we do and challenging them and then hopefully once we start to engage that challenge will come back and forth. But um, I know as a team we're trying to get better about really challenging the client. I'm trying to think at a higher level when they're engaging with us. Um, and not necessarily just kind of throwing things at us and expecting us to, you know, deliver a something without any sort of thought because that's really not. It's a really expensive way to do that. I guess:

Speaker 5:

21:47

it's a super expensive way to do that. It's like I was just thinking in my head like the analogy I would give someone, it would be, it's like hiring a landscape architect to mow your lawn. You wouldn't want to pay someone who has the expertise and the experience to transform how your marketing landscape or your marketing strategy works to simply, you know, simply be the, as we call it, you know, the arms and legs of your operation. That's what upwork is for. Vitamin talents or you know, or whatever else. And in fact, by the way, you know, a lot of agencies, and I, I can't speak to, you know, what'd you guys are doing at Quantico these days? They do the same thing for arms and legs type stuff, which is okay, which are paying the agency for is the strategy, the expertise and their experience across all these different clients that they're looking. Agency is exposed to more marketing problems in a single day than you as an internal marketing person are exposed to in a month. Like it's just the way it works. It's not a, that's not a, you know, a, an ego thing. It's just, it's just a question of exposure and mathematics and that's all right,:

Speaker 4:

22:50

the advantage, I mean, you're, you're really trying to reach into that, that experience and that exposure to all these different things because at the end of the day, and we say this all the time, you know, it's especially having done this as long as we have that most of our people have been with us for many years. There's rarely a client call or request that we haven't seen like a bazillion times before. Right. So that's a really kind of, hey, there's one, there's one piece in the show notes here that I don't want to touch on before we kind of move into some of our shorter parts of the segment. Take a little bit of a break here, uh, at the segment. But um, the whole concept of referral and, and I love this, this idea of sort of educating your customers how to, especially your happy customers on how to refer people over to you or sort of sell your products. So talk about what you were kind of thinking there.:

Speaker 5:

23:42

Well, you know, I think we always about it at Kalydeco and I mean everybody talks about it like there's no, there's no better lead than a referral lead, like the way that the Internet is working these days, whether it's facebook or whatever else, I mean more often than not it's friends and people go out looking for recommendations. So like the happier and more engaged your current customers are obviously the more of an opportunity you're going to turn them into an evangelist of some kind. And that means connecting them to your culture. That means connecting them. Um, you know, better to your product. Everybody wants to look smart and feel smarter or feel cool. I mean that's the, that's the, you know, the idea of social media and the Internet in general is that when people share or talk about things, the whole idea of it is that they want to look neat, sort of speak to their audience.:

Speaker 5:

24:26

And so if you can have them facilitate that experience for them with whether it was with content or with learning or ideas or. Or actually we're exploring more is like way more video. What you want to do is take your current customers and turn them into two megaphones for your actual business. Not Everybody's going to do that automatically. So like there our referral automation programs or incentives that you can leverage. But if you really do it well, I think an Nbr I'm curious what you think about this. I think it's a kind of happen organically on its own. I mean, if, if you're providing an excellent and superior customer experience than your customers going to want to tell somebody about that experience the next time someone asks them what digital agency do you use or what crm are you using are, you know, so on and so forth.:

Speaker 5:

25:10

I think it's a very logical thing that you actually shouldn't have to pay for. And if it's not happening once you start asking it to happen, in other words, like no one's going to give you a referral unless you ask them to do it. Um, but once you start asking if they're not doing it, then he actually got to go all the way back to the beginning and look at your product because you might have a problem in the product and that's, you talk about feedback loop a lot. Vr, that's a great way to kind of close that feedback loop. Even on the product side, which is a lot of people use products or services or whatever else because the pain of finding a new one is a challenge, but you don't want just to keep people because they're not, they're too lazy essentially to go find something new. You want people to be delighted with your, with your service. I know that was always our thing in Kalydeco, which is like we only liked clients to be 100 percent, almost satisfied with our services and if they weren't then we needed to get there because having a 60 percent certification satisfaction rate makes everybody frustrated on either side and it just doesn't create a good experience. So like monitoring referrals has as much to do with refining your product or service as it does with:

Speaker 4:

26:14

expanding your growth. That's so, so true. And like you said, one of the things that, we're actually, I'm going to talk about this as we kind of go into the segment break, so this would be a little bit of a teaser for the, uh, that uh, sort of rabbit hole, but one of the things that we're talking about doing is starting to use the net promoter score again. So because we also want, I think this is important to our good referral system is, is also placing in your client's mind the, the seed that it, you know, we want you to talk to other people about us. We, you to refer people and using that net promoter score a to kind of induce that thought process of, Hey, would you recommend to a colleague or a friend to us or to that product or that service. And I think that's a powerful because it works two ways. One, it gives you a level of satisfaction feedback, piece of data. Uh, but at the same time it also lights that seed that:

Speaker 3:

27:06

hey, like would I, would I refer to them? And then that kind of leads to the question of like, well, who would that person be? And so I think that that has a double. So with that, let's, uh, let's break here for a little bit of a segment break and then we'll come back with the rabbit hole:

Speaker 2:

27:21

of the week. You are listening to Kaleida coast, make the logo bigger podcast. You can find us on the web at [inaudible] dot com. K A l e I d I c o.com now back to the show.:

Speaker 3:

27:34

All right, so we're coming back here. I'm Mike. So you want to lead with a sort of where, where you went to your biggest challenge or rabbit hole of this week?:

Speaker 5:

27:44

Yeah, so my biggest rabbit hole of this week is freelancers in general. Hiring, prepping, engaging, getting a good result, managing their ally much, much more sort of like it's, you know, with the experience that I have obviously working on the agency side of things when I came over to to run a single marketing department, uh, I've tried to do my best to recognize the difference in value that I can extract from an agency relationship versus the things that need to just out to outsource through a single freelancer because we're a small team here as well rather than double paying for things. But what I kind of didn't expect I suppose and maybe it's because I'm doing more of the stuff on my own and didn't have the team around me that I had at Quantico and I have a team but like not to do this particular type of thing, which is, you know, the hiring, prepping and engaging of an actual freelancer is.:

Speaker 5:

28:33

It is a lengthy process by the way, like you gotta make sure that you are giving them the right information so that they can get back what you're looking for. You've got to vet them in the right way so you don't waste a whole bunch of time, you know, hiring the wrong people, then you've got to find the right type of freelancer who will engage with you at the level of which you want to be engaged with. I mean, there's a big difference between someone's going to go off and do their own thing versus someone that wants to talk to you every day. Um, and so like that is like the deep rabbit hole that I'm trying to define a better process for us even internally here at nutshell is to like how to acquire, you know, assess, and then leverage freelancers and a much more always on time.:

Speaker 4:

29:14

Obviously we do that as well. We have, uh, you know, got our core people that are on staff, but we also, to your point that or surgeon or when we're looking for arms and legs to do some specific niche stuff, we've got a freelancers. And in one of the things is I've kind of taken back over some of this that I. and we had one that went horrible, uh, because we can just kind of brought them on and we assume that they were equipped to sort of integrate with the team, uh, and that just went horribly. And so we've actually refine that process. So now I'm much like we do with an employee actually, um, this, this last time when I brought on a, just a, an awesome a freelancer. Actually we'd had, I actually prepped for her. And so, um, I made a very sort of methodical process and training kind of regiment that we were going to go through.:

Speaker 4:

30:04

And so I onboarded her sort of step by step a trainer in our systems that's, you know, we all have systems that we use and software that we've used. And um, the, the outcome was totally different and I think, you know, the other freelancer, I think obviously I think she's better than the last one that we had in that position or whatever. But I do believe that the onboarding really set her up for a lot better level of success than we did with the previous person that was holding that position. And so yeah, so that's, that's critical for sure. Um,:

Speaker 5:

30:43

I think you'd make a super important point by the way. And I actually, I've never really thought about it like that if you approach. So my onboarding here, like from a leadership perspective was excellent at nutshell. It was considered, it was, I mean essentially it was a month long by the way, which I was really grateful for a lot of. I had a fire hose of information, you know, kind of coming my way. Um, but if you think what you just said kind of really resonates with me in the sense that you think about hiring a freelancer just like you're hiring employee because essentially you are by the way, then it's gonna go way better for you. And I haven't really thought about it like that bar because the whole, technically that's antithesis to the whole idea of a freelancer and you don't want to hire an employee. Um, but, so that's not the point though, is like a freelancer. A good one is like a professional multiemployer they work for a lot of different people and like that's okay. And they manage their own time and, and whatever else, but like, you will get a better relationship with that freelancer if they buy into your, you know, your culture, your approach, you know, whatever it is. Like I just never thought about it like that. I think that's a great way to think about that. I'm going to have to go.:

Speaker 4:

31:45

That's what we, that's what I did. I mean the first one that I did after you left, we were bringing on an actually a marketing automation person and it was a disaster. And in these particular cases, I mean there's two things that are going on. One, you're integrating them into your system in your organization. Um, and usually because of the type of campaigns that we run, they're working with multiple team members because we do integrated campaigns or whatever. And then just invariably, no matter what you're trying to do, they're going to touch the client, right? They're going to interact with the client. Um, and so that can be a really messy experience if they don't know, especially this is something that we're really honing in on now is they don't know the way that, that Kalydeco, once that experience to go, they do their own thing.:

Speaker 4:

32:33

Right? And so that becomes, that can become a mess real fast. And um, yeah. So after that I'm like, okay, we have to get this person out or if you got another person in and this time, uh, one I did a lot more consideration to the front end and vetting or, and then the second thing was I said, okay, I'm going to take her through step by step. She's going to understand the tools we use, she's going to understand how we run email campaigns in this case. She's got to understand how we design them, how we know all that expectation and that literally set, um, so like a lot of our team members, we went wherever we needed to go and she happens to be in Dallas. And so I sat on a couple screen shares and we walked through the process and by the time she touched the project, she's ready to go and we had an awesome experience and um, and so that's working good. So I wouldn't do it any other way.:

Speaker 5:

33:27

That's fantastic. Well, and if you think about quantico specifically by the way, like one of our, you know, or one of your like rockstar employees, uh, David quilty the content director and he was starting out as a freelancer. And so the other thing that I think now that I've, like it comes full circle for me, the one you say like onboard or freelance or like you wouldn't employee, I'm the best case scenario often is that when you're onboarding a freelancer there filling a smaller gap, but you grow that gap because it's a good skill set. And then you've got like a rockstar employee that already knows your process and you actually don't have to go through the painful process of hiring, quote unquote an employee. Obviously if that person is interested in doing so. But yeah, I mean it's just, it, it's, it's a growth strategy. Not necessarily a like a reduced the pain strategies and better way:

Speaker 4:

34:14

a particular person. So she got you what we hired her for and then she's like, oh, and I'm also a copywriter and I'm like, oh well we're always looking for web copywriters in email copywriters specifically. Like, I don't need article writers. And she's like, no, no, no, I do that. And she's got some real high end examples of that. She's actually interviewed Elan Musk. So like having that conversation like you have some depth into inside of that were potentially just like the whole conversation we were having a lifetime value of that particular freelancer or an employee grows too because like we had a conversation and I would have gone and looked for maybe a web copywriter or maybe somebody to build out the copy for all these other emails. I would have looked somewhere else and she's sitting right there in my organization. So it kind of, that conversation kind of goes full circle as well.:

Speaker 4:

35:04

Um, since I've teased it, I'm going to go back real quick to my rabbit hole of the week. A little bit is really trying to figure out, uh, and I think this goes back to lifetime value of the customer and it's worse. They're starting to think about that is really increased the feedback cycle that we're getting from clients and, and intentionally net promoter score is kind of my first way to do this, but really make sure that we're reaching out on a regular basis to client, engaging them for feedback and understanding what they like about us, what they hate about us or what we can improve and not being afraid of that feedback loop, but really kind of intentionally going after it.:

Speaker 5:

35:43

That's critical,:

Speaker 5:

35:47

you know, as a, as a point on that. The agency that we work with now, by the way, I get a survey every two weeks, um, which actually leads me to my marketing topic thing. But uh, but yeah, they sent a survey every two weeks and it's very short. And just kind of ask you basically are satisfied. Are you with the services scale one to 10, would you refer us your net promoter score and then if there's any room for improvement, what is it? It's just a free form box, uh, and you know, and that's it. It doesn't have to be complicated I guess is to your point. Bar is like, it just needs to be. If you want to know, you should always want to know what your customers:

Speaker 4:

36:21

think about what you're going to have those touch points or whatever. I mean it's just, I'm always surprised when when we do get client feedback because we're not intentional with it when we get, um, we and there's time, you know, obviously we get a lot of positive feedback, but there's times when we get negative feedback. I'm always sort of surprised sometimes the negative feedback because oftentimes it's in areas that were, we're actually usually pretty good about, but for whatever reason we've taken our eye off the ball and what particular circumstance or another. Um, and we didn't know about it. And so that's another reason you just gotTa that keeps, keeps you, keeps you honest. I'm alright. Top recommendations and then we'll wind this one up.:

Speaker 5:

37:02

Yeah. So, like, so it actually dovetails really nicely into this. So the, oh my top recommendation for the week, by the way. Sorry we skipped a section. Let's go to. Yeah, no, no, no, no, let's go. Let's people understand, we can talk about surveys at a whole other topic to discuss. So my recommendation for the week by the way, is take a break and treat yourself. Um, and I've gone down basically I'm a, I'm a Gamer. I like video games a lot more often than not first person shooters a on my xbox, but as of recently I've been hanging out with a lot of engineers and developers. Uh, so as a result, I'm being reintroduced to say reintroduced to the PC gaming world. And so player unknown's battlegrounds is one of the coolest kind of like strategy, both first person and third person shooters ever. So I would say treat yourself, whether it's video games or whatever else, spend a little money on yourself, find something fun to do and, and, you know, take a break, man. That's my, that's my recommendation for the week as. It'll always be my recommendation by the way, folks. Sorry,:

Speaker 4:

38:01

I guess, uh, so my top recommendation, uh, so I'll give you one. I'm trying to think what it's on. I think it's, I think it's on BBC, but I don't know. I rented it through Apple TV or whatever. Actually it was my wife's pick, which, um, but it was super cool is I'm killing eve. I don't know if you've heard of that show, but it's a point. I forget her name now. She was on grey's anatomy I think. Um,:

Speaker 4:

38:32

so she's, she's an Asian woman and uh, she's just crackpot and then the other, I mean just awesome actor and then uh, yeah, Sandro. Yep. So she's awesome in this. And so the whole thing is kind of a spy thriller and it has this assassin and she's sort of a profiler and she's going after this acid and of course becomes a little bit obsessed with this character and it's, yeah, it's a, it's a really, really good, well done. A sort of series and so you can buy the season or whatever, but I think it's on BBC America and they've also, and this is Kinda cool with shows now they're doing. I think walking dead with the talking to kind of started the genre, but with every show because you buy the series, because obviously we don't have BBC now with every single show. They kind of go behind the scenes and they talk about the make, you know, the producing the writing and it's Kinda cool to do that.:

Speaker 4:

39:33

But anyway, super, super engaging, a fun, a kind of twisted assassin sort of thing. But it's like, it's got a cool, it's got two really strong female characters. It's got a cool twist of humor, uh, in it and it's just super well done. So definitely should check that out. Um, and then taking a break. I'm, we're, I'm, I'm all for that. We're, we're forcing more and more of that in our organization. I'm trying to force myself to kind of read more outside of our day to day stuff, trying to read things off topic and right, right now reading a book about why nations fail. I'm so super fascinated. I become fascinated too, like from a reading standpoint, you know, we're, we're obviously in an economic surge, um, and having been through one, like kind of deep dramatic recession, I'm always kinda starting to kind of get heightened and curious about like when the next cycle falls, you know, and what that looks like. Um, and so I've got a handful of books on my, on my nightstand, so to speak, that, uh, all about trying to kind of understand what takes economic cycles down because [inaudible] kind of nothing really changes, but all of a sudden people become less confidence. Things change, you know, in the market and people get nervous and make, you know, behave badly anyway, there's a little bit of a rabbit hole too, I guess.:

Speaker 4:

41:04

What would it be like all those fun guys in the big short fall there early, you know, so it's for the love of God please, because that early up and uh, we'll make sure that you go out there, give us some feedback or write some. Uh, I know we're starting to get some traction. We're starting to get some audience here. So we love all you folks that are listening to what we love doing the show, hopefully provide some value, we'd love for you guys to give us some feedback back:

Speaker 3:

41:34

to us. Um, so on all those places that you download your podcasts and I started leaving some comments and feedback or things you want to hear about. I mean, obviously, hopefully we invoked some questions in your mind and things you want to hear about. Uh, we love to kind of lay it out there in a transparent way. So if you give us something to talk about, uh, will, will at least give you our opinion. All right. Until next time.:

Speaker 2:

41:56

See how that's for sure. Alright, adios. Thanks for listening to collided lives. Make the logo bigger podcast. Leave your comments and reviews wherever you download your podcast. Find us on the web at [inaudible] dot com. K A l e I d I c o.com.: